Trump is not our first criminal president
By Thom Hartmann for the Independent Media Institute
Most
Americans view Donald Trump as an aberration, a one-off, the exception. He’s
our first “criminal president” they think, the first to have committed crimes
to get into office, while in office, or both.
Most
Americans, in this regard, are wrong, and it’s a tragic statement about both
the way we teach American history in our schools and the way our corporate
media deals with past presidential crimes.
If
previous Republican presidents had been held to account for their crimes the
way it appears Trump is about to be, Trump may well have not been as brazen in
everything from his violations of the Hatch Act to the Espionage Act to his
explicitly asking Vladimir Putin to intervene in the 2016 election.
Everybody
knows that Richard Nixon got caught orchestrating and then covering up a
break-in at the DNC headquarters in the Watergate complex, and that he avoided
going to prison by resigning his office. Yet it’s no secret that Nixon
committed a far more serious crime — naked treason — just to get into office in
the first place.
When
the LBJ White House tapes were
released in 2013, the world learned that Johnson had negotiated a secret deal with
the Vietnamese to end the war in the late fall of the election year of 1968.
Nixon
got wind of it and, through a campaign aide during a meeting in his New York
apartment, reached out to the South Vietnamese ambassador offering inducements
to pull out of the peace talks and scuttle the deal, which they then abandoned
just as it was about to be signed.
The FBI was bugging the Vietnamese ambassador and conveyed the plot to President Johnson, who then called Everett Dirksen, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, to ask for help in stopping Nixon (you can listen to the entire conversation here):
President Johnson: “Some of our folks, including some of the
old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify
the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they
could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this
in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is
treason.”
Sen. Dirksen: “I know.”
Polling
showed that Vice President Humphrey was going to easily win the election so LBJ
chose not to disrupt the process by publicly accusing Nixon of treason;
knowledge of the crime went with Johnson, Humphrey, and Dirksen to their graves
after Nixon won the election in an unexpected upset.
But
we’ve now known about Nixon’s double-dealing for a full decade. We’ve known
that Nixon’s treason led to the death of an additional 22,000 Americans and
more than a million Vietnamese. All entirely unnecessary and the fruit of a
monstrous crime just to seize the White House.
Imagine
what Republicans would be saying to this day if it was proven that JFK, for
example, had committed treason to beat Nixon in 1960. Everybody in America
would be able to recite chapter-and-verse of the story. (Republicans are still
so committed to the idea that Chicago’s Mayor Daley stole that election for JFK
that the New York Times saw fit to publish a review debunking a
2022 book re-asserting that claim.)
If
Nixon’s crime was at least frequently referenced by the media and Democratic
politicians, Trump may have thought twice about all his campaign’s secret
meetings with Russians and his open solicitation of their help. Or of hiring a Putin agent to run
his campaign.
Similarly,
just three months ago the world learned for sure what the former Iranian
President had been trying to tell us since 2013: that Reagan committed a
similar treason to win the White House in 1980.
During
the Carter/Reagan election battle of that year, then-President Carter had
reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to
release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in
Tehran.
Bani-Sadr
was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor,
successfully ran for President that summer on the popular position of releasing
the hostages:
“I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election
campaign…. I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote…. Other
candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of
votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it
[hostage-taking].”
Carter
was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help he could end the embarrassing hostage
crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in
November of 1979. Reagan’s campaign surrogates had been ridiculing Carter,
calling him weak and ineffective.
But
behind Carter’s back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with
the leader of Iran’s radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to
keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 presidential election.
Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased
for Iran, and the Reagan campaign was happy to promise them.
The
Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called 1980
“Iran-Contra October Surprise” — sabotaged President Carter’s and Iranian
President Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages. As President Bani-Sadr
told The Christian Science Monitor in
March of 2013:
“After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I
had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and
Reaganism.
“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine
negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the
attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages
before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were
not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”
The
Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter’s re-election hopes.
And the same day Reagan took the oath of office — to the minute, as
Reagan put his hand on the Bible — by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal, the
Ayatollah released the American hostages.
Keeping
his side of the deal, Reagan began selling the Iranian regime weapons and spare
parts in 1981 and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the
so-called “Iran Contra” scandal.
The
New York Times confirmed the crime in March of
this year, when former Republican Speaker of the Texas House and Lieutenant
Governor Ben Barnes — the guy who got George W. Bush into the Texas Air
National Guard to keep him out of Vietnam as a favor to then-Congressman George
HW Bush — laid out the story.
He’d
known about it because he was on the trip with former Texas Governor John
Connally to France where the deal was cut.
“History needs to know that this happened,” Barnes, now 85, told the Times. “I
think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for
President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like
we’ve got to get it down some way.”
Had
Bani-Sadr been taken seriously; had the investigations into Iran Contra not
been blown up by then-Attorney General Bill Barr and President
George HW Bush pardoning the main criminals involved on Christmas Eve of 1992 as he
was leaving office; Trump may have thought twice about sharing top-secret
national security documents with random spies hanging around Mar-a-Largo and
Bedminster.
Or sending Rand Paul on a
private mission to hand-deliver still-unknown secret documents to Putin’s
people in Moscow in 2017.
Similarly,
if Nixon and Reagan had been prosecuted — or at least outed — Jared Kushner may
have been less enthusiastic about sharing top-secret information with MBS that
helped him stage a palace coup and take over Saudi Arabia, an apparent crime
for which MBS appears to have rewarded both Kushner and Trump with billions of
dollars.
As The Jerusalem Post reported on
March 23, 2018:
“Kushner, who is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and the
crown prince had a late October meeting in Riyadh.
“A week later, Mohammed began what he called an ‘anti-corruption
crackdown.’ The Saudi government arrested and jailed dozens of members of the
Saudi royal family in a Riyadh hotel – among them Saudi figures named in a
daily classified brief read by the president and his closest advisers that Kushner
read avidly….
“According to the report, Mohammed told confidants that he and
Kushner discussed Saudis identified in the classified brief as disloyal to
Mohammed.”
The
day before, both CBS and The Intercept quoted MBS as gloating
that Kushner was “in his pocket.”
The
Washington Post noted that:
“Recently ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national
security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was
freelancing U.S. foreign policy and might make naive mistakes, according to
people familiar with their reactions.
“… [National Security Advisor] McMaster was concerned there were
no official records kept of what was said on the calls.
“Tillerson was even more aggrieved, they said, once remarking to
staff: ‘Who is secretary of state here?’”
Weirdly,
our media is so invested in “both sides” narratives that unless they can point
to a crime by a Democratic president, they seem to have no interest in
reporting on Republican presidential crimes. The result is that Trump thought
he could get away with whatever he did in office and afterwards.
As
Donald Trump faces the music for a small slice of the crimes he committed
against our nation and our democracy, let’s not forget that he’s not the first.
He didn’t do this alone.
He was
simply carrying on a Republican tradition that stretches all the way back to
1968.
Thom Hartmann is America’s number one progressive talk-show host and the New York Times bestselling author of The Hidden History of American Healthcare and more than 30 other books in print. His online writings are compiled at HartmannReport.com. He is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute.